Events with Alicia

March 2019

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A bit of rambling: What is 'nature'?

Since I am cut off from the news, I thought I’d discuss some philosophical issues. Environmentalism is shot through with the same dualisms that have confused Western philosophy from the beginning, and the practical effect (philosophy does too have practical effects!) is to confuse environmental discourse and strategy. It’s probably too much to get into in a single blog post, but let’s just think for a moment: What do we mean when we refer to “nature”? Of course there’s the colloquial meaning, i.e., trees and streams and stuff. But follow it up a little. What is nature? Or, phrasing it another way, what isn’t nature? What separates nature from not-nature? One common line of thinking contrasts the natural to the supernatural. Nature is the material world, and then there’s the immaterial world inhabited by God, souls, angels, ghosts, and what have you. A related and sometimes overlapping school of thought contrasts nature with humanity. The contrast might be positive: Nature is violent, insensate, and irrational (red in tooth and claw), while human beings are unique in virtue of possessing rationality. This has been the default approach for most of Western history. Or it might be negative: Nature as a kind of harmonious, balanced, holistic system (“Gaia”), while human beings are a cancer on the planet, either unaware or dismissive of any “natural” limits. This is a more recent way of thinking, bound up with the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s, frequently found among those who profess “deep ecology.” Now, if you believe in the supernatural — i.e., God — then there’s no need to trouble your mind. Usually the picture is pretty clear: God “gave” nature to us, his most special creatures, to take care of (dominate or tend lovingly, depending on your predilections). Or, if you’re of a certain persuasion, nature is basically disposable, since the Rapture’s on the way. The Enlightenment project has been to either bracket the supernatural or dismiss it entirely. For secularists, then, it’s a little more complicated: How do we conceive of nature and humanity, environmentalism itself, without the supernatural?